Neither here nor there

For six weeks, Joe Klein has been travelling through Europe, taking the pulse of the continent and exploring its fractious relationship with his native country. He ends his journey in Britain with the gap between the US and Europe wider than ever. So which way should we turn? Neither, he says - we are perfectly placed to take the best of both worlds. And he has some tips: get Bill Clinton to make speeches and Silvio Berlusconi to arrange the social events

Six weeks on the road, and Heathrow looms. Funny how travel distorts time: I've been gone for ever and arrived only yesterday. Part of the problem is that I've done this jaunt the American way, as a mad dash rather than a leisurely stroll. Work, work, work. No time to visit a single museum, unless you count the city of Rome as one. No time to while away the hours in cafes. The apogee of my continental naughtiness: I was lured into smoking several cigarettes. I did get very drunk one night in Poland, with Adam Michnik, a catharsis I needed and enjoyed immensely. I should have loafed more, taken sick leave, filed a claim against the Guardian for exposing me to France, where existential anguish is contagious. It's a miracle I survived that hothouse of anomie. But no, I'm a tough American: my angst is limited to guilt over the size of my wife's sport utility vehicle.

And what have I learned? Let me tell you a story. Coffee one morning at an outdoor cafe in Rome, with two young people, one a student and the other a recent graduate. Both veterans of the past year's street protests, in Genoa and in Rome. As always, I began by asking, "What's so bad about America?"

"It's not just America, it's the entire west," said Pietro, the recent graduate, now a graphic designer. "We've created a model the world can't support. If everyone in the world used toilet paper the way we do, there'd be no more trees."

Maria Vittoria's problem with America was cultural. "They've given us the model of the strong, victorious man, with an emphasis on professional success at any cost. The moral and spiritual penetration is insidious and it is everywhere. McDonald's, American movies... "

"I like American movies," Pietro interrupted, with a guilty smile. "I particularly like the violent fantasies. Star Wars." And while he was at it, he admitted, "I like my shoes, too," displaying a rather battered pair of Nikes. "I know this is probably juvenile, but I'm a child inside."

Aren't we all! Inherent in that childishness is a need to be protected, a need for order - not just a sense of stability in everyday life, but a larger sense of order as well: something to believe in. The conversation took a very interesting turn when I asked them what they believed in. "I believe this corporate system is wrong," said Maria.

But what replaces it, I asked: socialism? "No, no, no," said Pietro. "My parents were members of the communist church."

And to which church did he belong? "That's the problem. There are two churches now. Capitalism and Islam. Capitalism is crass and Islam is crazy. The anti-globalist movement is not quite a church, yet. There are different strands, things I believe and things I don't."

About a hundred years ago, the American sociologist Thorstein Veblen wrote a book about the coming crassness called The Theory of the Leisure Class. It may be that the current anomie could be called the reverse: The Leisure of the Theory class. Europeans, it seems to me, are unmoored in the midst of abundance. Pietro is right: they have no church. Their parents had communism and Catholicism (all right: they had Protestantism as well, even if it isn't alliterative). Both are pretty much gone now. Indeed, it is astonishing to an American how secular Europe has become. During a conversation with a woman here in England - I can't quite remember whom she was - I casually uttered the words, "Thank God for that." The woman was shocked. "Why do you say that? Do you actually believe in God?"

But there is a third church for Europeans, a rather powerful one: the church of national identity. It is a great source of pride and security and problems: a Frenchman knows exactly what being French means, the siesta sensibility still rules in Spain, and the tendency of Brits - even cool, young business Brits in the City - to need a pint and a gab at the end of the day seems encoded in the national DNA. There is an undercurrent of informed-elite concern about this: rampant ethnicity proved a European disaster in the 20th century; it seems anachronistic, economically untenable and a bit crude now. That is why politics has become so brutish on the continent: demagogues are doing quite well selling the past. They exploit the threat to national sovereignty from above - from Brussels - and, most profoundly, from below: from the rush of immigrants, particularly those who do not share European values. As a Frenchwoman told me, "We believe religion should be a private thing. Why must they take it into the street, the way they dress and all?" But immigrants are necessary to keep the national economies, and the social-services systems, afloat. And Brussels, which can create a market with 500 million players if eastern Europe is included, is necessary as well if Europeans want to throw their weight in the world. Still, there is great anxiety about how Britain, how France - how Europe - will be defined 20 years down the road.

This, I suspect, is a prime source of the deeper resentments toward America - that is, those not related to the gratuitously ideological, blithely boorish behaviour of the current administration. America doesn't have an identity problem. It has a powerful national religion: Americanness. It has a national ideology, too: informality. It is threatened neither from above nor below; it is threatened for the moment from the outside, by terrorists, but that has only served to strengthen the national sense of community (and from the inside, by a nauseating array of business scammers - although this is less serious a problem than some Europeanists would like to think). The true power of Americanness is that it beggars ethnicity: we luxuriate in the mongrelisation of our bloodlines - at least, a constant majority of us do; we believe that the things we have in common are far more important than those which divide us. The rainbow cascade of immigrants, which began in 1965 after a 40-year closed-door policy threatened to bland us to death, has succeeded in making us even more American. The Latinos and Arabs and Africans and south Asians and east Asians have not only proved energetic entrepreneurs and spectacular citizens, they've also served to take the binary edge off the vicious old black-white racial confrontation.

The American identity can be summarised in a single polling question: we are the only country in the world where a majority has consistently believed - with the exception of a few years in the late 1970s - that next year will be better. Such optimism must seem obnoxious to the rest of the world, especially when accompanied by overwhelming military and commercial power. The essential American credulousness - we believe in our nation, our system, our sensibility (those who demur usually do so on the grounds that we are not living up to our ideals), we even tend to believe in God - must seem pretty obnoxious, too.

I don't want to minimise Europe's "America" problem. The anger seems to have grown during my six weeks here. I've heard about it constantly, and most credibly from sober sorts - such as Lord (Richard) Holme of Cheltenham, who has been deeply involved in British-American exchange programmes for years and says, with great regret, that "America has never seemed quite so far away". Of course, one hears it from less sober sorts as well. Each week seems to bring new outrages: most recently, George Bush's Middle East speech - in which he guaranteed the lifetime presidency of the corrupt terrorist Yasser Arafat - and the huge WorldCom fraud, and the mistaken bombing of an Afghan wedding. Each day seems to bring new evidence of an increasingly careless and thoughtless hyper-power - to use the French epithet du jour - evidence that causes pain to America's friends, and brings joy to the usual array of juvenile, leisure-addled leftist intellectuals.

There are real problems, real differences, between Europe and America. But I suspect that the rift wouldn't seem quite so raw if Bush weren't president. Last week, at a gathering of his diminished tribe in Memphis, Al Gore said that if he had the 2000 campaign to do over again, he would ignore his platoons of consultants, pollsters and marketers and "let 'er rip". Presumably this means he wouldn't have been so patently dishonest. It suggests that he might occasionally have told the American people something they didn't want to hear; at the very least, it implies that he would have dislodged the flagpole from the area just south of his lower spine.

And what if he had won? There certainly would be less of the signature Bushian callousness toward our allies. Multilateralism - at least, the appearance of multilateralism - would rule. Petroleum wouldn't. Kyoto, or something like it, would be signed. There would be no American tariffs on steel, no pornographic corporate farm subsidies; regulators would actually be attempting to control the excesses of enterprise, if not often succeeding. Officials of the United States government wouldn't be going around lecturing the world about the evils of abortion and the joys of gun ownership. My guess is that Gore would have prosecuted the Afghanistan campaign much as Bush has - which means that civilians would, on occasion, be mistakenly bombed. That is part of the price of war. I'd also guess that there would be great American reluctance about joining the international criminal court: we have very different notions about the proper use of force - this may be the greatest philosophical difference between Europeans and Americans. We would not want American guards at Camp X-Ray called up on charges by foolish judges who believe that the use of masks and manacles while transporting the most dangerous of war criminals is a crime against humanity. But those differences would be more tolerable in a general context of cooperation. Europeans wouldn't be so upset if the American assumption was partnership, interrupted by occasional disputes, rather than disdain interrupted by occasional spasms of condescension.

But Bush is president, and may remain so for the next six years. The Atlantic does seem a bit wider these days. And there are questions now about the most basic political propositions: is there any alternative to the American way? Are we doomed to the mushy, technocratic, centrist politics that seems to be turning so many people off? Is there another European church waiting to be born? I sense, after my six-week wander, a growing impatience among the Theory Class, a desire for some clearcut resolutions. But there are some questions that just shouldn't be answered peremptorily; solutions evolve - messily, incoherently, stumbled upon by politicians. Or they don't evolve: the poor, for example, will always be with us, as a Jew from the West Bank once said.

For the past few weeks, I've had a rather grumpy travelling companion: Will Hutton. Not Will himself, who is a charming and intelligent fellow - we had a nice lunch on my very first day of travels. But I've been reading Will's new book, The World We're In, which is another story entirely: it is everything the author is not - simplistic, hasty and vituperative. It posits a stark alternative: there is the American way or the European way, and Britain must choose one or the other. The American way features rapacious capitalism and social insensitivity, undergirded by a radical intellectual conservatism that has swept all before it. The European way is far more mellow - a slower, more stable corporate culture; a far more generous welfare state; lots of museums and holidays; a political philosophy that draws the best from the two old churches, communism and Catholicism.

Hutton has a point about the rapacious capitalism, the tendency to place short-term profits above long-term growth. He is also right to criticise the antisocial myopia of conservative thinkers such as Leo Strauss, who have had an influence on some of the more extreme sorts lurking in the shadows of the Bush administration. Hutton's right, too, that America's social safety net is deficient, especially when it comes to healthcare (but he totally misses the massive income transfer to the working poor that took place during the Clinton administration). It is possible, though, to concede all these points and discard Hutton's general thrust as rubbish. He simply doesn't understand how America works, or why it is as vibrant as it is.

He follows a long tradition of leftish pessimists who predict America's imminent demise. He sees "an ominous echo of the 1920s" in the stock-market frenzy of the 90s and the recent frauds, without acknowledging the lessons learned and implemented during the Great Depression: the Keynesian manipulation of fiscal and monetary policy has had a very successful 70-year run of blunting inflationary and deflationary cycles in the US. Worse, he links America's economic fate with that of the great corporations, such as Boeing, which seems, for the moment, to be losing its competitive battle against Airbus. But the American economy isn't about Boeing; it's about the small businesses and new ideas constantly being born, most failing, some succeeding. It is about the freedom of employers to hire, fire, start, stop and change course. It's about the freedom of all comers to begin a business of their own, with a minimum of fuss or paperwork. In the early part of his administration, Bill Clinton had a wonderful statistic that he would trot out against the naysayers concerned by the "massive" wave of layoffs besetting the Fortune 500 companies: in the past two years, he would say, there have been more new businesses started by women than there have been people laid off by the Fortune 500.

Actually, Hutton's analysis of America is somewhat more detailed than his account of western Europe. The latter seems a romantic fantasy at best. He apotheosises several large, well-run companies - Volkswagen, Nokia and Michelin - and extrapolates their practices to all European enterprises. There's a problem, though: these industrial giants represent a small and declining part of the advanced western economies. And Hutton's beloved Germany lags in most other economic sectors: the growth in information-age services and technology has averaged 8.9% a year over the past decade in America versus 4.9% in Germany.

There are, furthermore, powerful disincentives to start new businesses and hire new employees in most European countries. I spent a morning with Traugott Klose of the Free University of Berlin, where 20% of liberal-arts students linger on campus for 12 semesters or more before getting a degree. Why? Because it is far easier for a company to give a temporary job to a student - only about one-third of social taxes need be paid and students have no right to protest if they are let go - than to hire a graduate permanently. There are now urban legends about German students - Grey Panthers, they are called - who go directly from school to pension: at the Free University, one "student" is still drifting about after 72 semesters. (In Holland, the difficulty in firing employees has led to a rather remarkable statistic: one out of every 16 Dutch workers is on permanent sick leave). There are other problems with Hutton's thesis. The first is the dog that doesn't bark: Will's World doesn't seem to include Asia. He doesn't mention China once. He mentions the other burgeoning Asian economies only as victims of American-led International Monetary Fund reform (though most seem to have recovered nicely). The truth is, Europe and the US are not just competing against each other, but also against Asia - and if Hutton thinks the American welfare state is sketchy, he should check out China's. There simply isn't any health insurance for most workers in non-state enterprises. There are practically no labour rules. America is a worker's paradise by contrast. This is The World We're Really In; it may be the Hobbesian future we're competing against.

In any case, why on earth must Britain choose one path or the other - the European model or the American? Why not mix and match? Why not take the freedom of the American labour market and combine it with an aggressive re-employment programme for those who are sacked, for example? But Hutton and a great many others are spoiling for a fight. In fact, there are competing intellectual street gangs on each side of the Atlantic these days, and both are filled with a rather lunatic bloodlust. For all the salon talk in Europe about arrogant super-duper-powers led by idiot cowboys, there is an equal amount of bleating about anti-semitic, Arab-loving, crypto-Trotskyite Euroweenies in America. The caricatures are poison; they have consequences. They are too easily digested, too easily passed through the public bloodstream; they provide a sugar rush for the idle and foolish. We gave the last century over to the vehement idealists: they gave us the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and Britain's rail privatisation scheme. It's time for a new paradigm. And I have a modest proposal:

Let Hutton captain 50 Euroweenies; let Norman Podhoretz, the ancient neoconservative crustacean, captain 50 Amerigoths. Let us transport both squads to a desert island and ask them to compete - not just in standard survivor games such as worm-eating, but also in more erudite pursuits such as hieroglyph reading and grant-proposal writing. Let them box and wrestle and debate as well - perhaps a new sport could be invented: debate boxing. We can televise all this, although I'm not sure there would be many viewers. Then again, perhaps we should avoid making intellectuals into celebrities. Perhaps we should leave them on that desert island and go about the serious business of picking out what's best on both sides of the Atlantic, and making a nice little society for ourselves.

I have several other modest proposals. The first is a basic principle: going it together is better than going it alone - diversity trumps homogeneity. America's diversity is its greatest economic and social asset; if the current president - who has been quite courageous in confronting the xenophobes in his party on immigration - could extend himself just the slightest bit intellectually, he might see that the diversity principle applies transnationally as well. On your side of the Atlantic, it seems obvious that the EU is Europe's only path toward relevance, and the best chance to cleanse the continent's virulently ethnocentric soul. This leads to the real world of policy: it is a moral imperative that the EU expand to include the former communist countries to the east as quickly as possible. It's probably also high time for Britain to adopt the euro. Indeed, let's have some real fun: merge the dollar and the euro, since they've pretty much achieved market parity, and the euro comes - at least, it appears to come - equipped with fiscal disciplines that the budget-busting Bush administration badly needs.

Finally, in order to return some much-needed religious pomp and circumstance to our public life, I have a few ceremonial suggestions. Silvio Berlusconi should be put in charge of all social arrangements - all future celebrations, that is; parties, not policy - on both sides of the Atlantic. And Clinton should be hired to deliver all major eulogies: if we have poet laureates, why not a mourner laureate? I have a few small changes I'd like to propose about soccer as well... but we'll leave those until we meet again. For now, I board the plane and return home - to search for a nice outdoor cafe that serves espresso and sweet cakes, where I can sit and relax, and turn on my tape of the world's most ghastly accordion music, and watch the pigeons chuttle about and the girls wheel by, and show all my American friends how truly continental I have now become.